INTERCOMPARISON OF DIFFERENT ENERGY PREDICTION METHODS WITHIN THE EUROPEAN PROJECT 'PERFORMANCE' - RESULTS OF THE 1ST ROUND ROBIN

摘要

Eight separate energy prediction methods, developed independently across European Universities andResearch Centres, have been compared with respect to their estimated DC energy generation for five different photovoltaic(PV) module technologies and 7 different sites distributed over whole Europe. The analysis of this work is the basis forfurther improvements of each of the modelling approaches and thus enables a reduction of the prediction error in PV yieldestimations.The recently completed first of three planned round-robin inter-comparisons found that the agreement for all methods and alltechnologies is within ±5% on an annual basis, provided that the environmental parameters incident irradiance and themodule temperature are well described. This good accuracy was also found when translating the energy yield measured atone location in Europe to another for an identical module utilising shorter time periods (months). Significantly higher errorswere found when using different PV modules of the same manufacturer and technology to predict the energy yield at othersites. Here the variation in module power rating dominated the results of the energy prediction methods and a correction forthese differences had to be applied.